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Searching for Sustainability in the Generation of Knowledge: Reducing the Gap Between Academia and Business

Searching for Sustainability in the Generation of Knowledge: Reducing the Gap Between Academia and Business

Gonzalo R. Llanos-Herrera (Universidad Finis Terrae, Chile) and Rony Castillo Alarcón (Universidad de Chile, Chile)
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-9301-1.ch007
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Abstract

The link between the practitioner's world and academia is not without its complications. If we assume that academics are responsible for producing knowledge while practitioners are responsible for its application, we could be excused for thinking that the natural procedure would be a joint effort, where these two worlds coincide. However, thanks to globalization—and scenarios of unheard-of speed and polarization—these human conditions, far from tending to converge, have in fact diverged due to technology's erasing of distances. Evidence suggests that these two groups function better apart, given the nature of their particular realities, and the so-called “Mode 2” was proposed in 1994, as a methodology capable of bringing both visions closer together; however, despite Mode 2's benefits, sizeable changes have yet to be observed. This work analyzes certain elements that could help to reverse this situation.
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Practitioners And Academics: The Differences Between Their Two Worlds

Methodology vs. Purpose

One of the most relevant findings on this topic is related to the cognitive conditions that divide practitioners and academics, associated with what Schulze (1997) called the “transition state”. He identified two delimited states - “not knowing what the ends are” on the one hand and “ignorance of the means” on the other.

In detail, this perspective suggests that academia shares the same paradigm and has focused its attention on the means of obtaining knowledge for the specific purpose of continuing to be part of that integrating academic paradigm (Kuhn, 2013). On the other hand, practitioners enjoy greater flexibility and focus their attention mainly on the ends, as we can see when observing the traditional system of professional goals.

This does not infer that academics, unlike practitioners, are exempt from a framework of goals, but rather that they do not share the same focus on parameters. An example that reflects this situation is that which is proposed by Sharma & Bansal (2020), who develop a very interesting viewpoint based on the fact that the knowledge systems for academics and for practitioners are different. Their analysis concludes that a fundamental premise for achieving the co-creation of knowledge is the formulation of an explicit process that somehow contemplates both these parameters and has them converge.

In other study, Carson (2001) identified three groups of marketing researchers: academics, business consultants and members of the applied world or practitioners. These groups are distinguishable by applying two criteria, on the one hand rigor and validity and on the other qualitative and quantitative methods. For this author, academics and business consultants share a tendency towards the rigor and validity given to the use of quantitative techniques, while practitioners rely on intuition and qualitative techniques. This consequently enables different, clearly-identified paradigms between the two groups.

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